The invention relates to a wiper blade of a windshield with a protective rail.
Known windshield wipers have a wiper arm that is connected to the wiper blade in an articulated manner. The wiper blade includes a supporting bracket system or a flat, bar-shaped, elastic support element, which guides a wiper strip over a vehicle window, a windshield or a rear window. This wiper strip is comprised of an elastomer, e.g., a natural or synthetic rubber or of ethylene propylene. It has a top strip, which is connected via a tilting web with a wiper lip that is adjacent to the vehicle window. The tilting web is formed by two longitudinal grooves that are open to the outside.
Covering the wiper strip with a protective rail before a new motor vehicle is preserved in order to assure that the wiper strip is in a perfect state when the motor vehicle is delivered is known from DE 30 05 965 A1. The protective rail is not removed until the new motor vehicle is delivered to an end consumer after the final preservation. If, however, the windshield gets dirty during interim storage of the motor vehicle, during preservation, etc., or if sight is impaired by rain, it is not easy for the motor vehicle's wiper system to clean the windshield so that the motor vehicle can be moved around, because the protective profile is rigid and hard and is only partially adjacent to the windshield.
As a result, the protective rail has a flexible band on the side facing the windshield, which, e.g., is extruded onto the protective rail. Said protective rail is comprised preferably of hard PVC and the band of soft PVC.
The protective profile is fixed to the wiper blade, in that it engages with claws in the longitudinal grooves, which form the tilting web. The protective rail does not protect the parts of the wiper strip that project beyond the wiper lip. In addition, the hard protective rail can follow the curvatures of the vehicle window only to a slight degree.
EP 0 635 411 A1 discloses a wiper blade with a protective rail, whose base body has a V-shaped cross-sectional profile and clasps a wiper lip of a wiper strip, in that inwardly pointing webs engage in longitudinal grooves of the wiper strip. A top strip of the wiper strip is held by claws, which are part of a supporting bracket system and engage in additional longitudinal grooves of the wiper strip. Formed on the base body of the protective rail beyond the inwardly pointing webs are lateral fingers, which can extend over the entire length of the wiper blade and laterally cover the claws, wherein the fingers have inwardly bent shoulders, which can be used to clip the protective rail on the claws. A wiper lip is externally fixed on the edge of the protective rail, where the side walls of the base body converge in a V-shape. This gives the protective rail the possibility of drying and cleaning the vehicle window. However, because of its great bending resistance moment, the protective rail is very resistant to bending around the vertical axis so that it is only able to adapt to the curvature of the vehicle window in a negligible manner.